"And god help you if you are an ugly girl/'course too pretty is also your doom/'cause everyone harbors a secret hatred for the prettiest girl in the room"

I can understand why any real discussion on the politics of beauty raised in Samantha Brick's Daily Mail article is being undermined under a tide of ridicule; women openly admitting confidence of this magnitude is considered an ugly thing, an exercise in vanity rather than an observation on women's internalized misogyny, and the Mail is renowned for baiting readers with terrible writers and right-wing rhetoric. But whether we like it or not, Brick is right: women can be the worst haterz.

Girls are trained to be deeply judgmental, of themselves and each other. Society teaches us to internalize rules about body and beauty and behaviour, and to enforce these ideas in competitive, violent and self-destructive ways. Women are rarely encouraged to truly support each other, and being bold enough to claim yr a victim of prettiness is massively taboo because it destabilizes the idea that women are  rewarded (in any true, meaningful or lasting way) for being pretty. We are socialized to strive for beauty, to pluck, starve, bleach and surgically modify our way to beauty, but never own it. Confronting the ways women punish each other - for being too pretty or not pretty enough - is uncomfortable, because it means acknowledging our part in propping up patriarchy, but the issue of the Mean Girls/Dawn Wiener syndrome is a conversational we need to have, preferably in more radical and progressive spheres than the pages of the Daily Mail.

the Lil Kim vs Nicki Minaj situation and rap beef dynamics

'Black Friday' is depressing. There is a vicious, voyeuristic pleasure to be had in the diss track modes of hip hop, but the issues operating underneath these spats - which have ended up being fatal in a number of tragic, well-known cases - are way serious if you value rap as more then just a capitalist-appropriated form of entertainment.
So Nicki took "subliminal shots" at Lil Kim? Nah, she just dipped into the usual hip hop braggadocio posturing, a card any newcomer earning their spurs is bound to pull. She drew on a convention that Kim has both participated in and profited from. Sad times when someone with such a golden CV has to attack a younger artist - one who has consistently paid homage - for some borrowed shine. I  agree wholeheartedly with all the points Minaj makes in this radio interview. Kim would have served herself better by taking an MC Lyte approach: accepting the dues paid with the good grace of a veteran confident in her legacy, and propelling any new projects on love and support from her hip hop sistren, not shunning them and insisting on an unnecessarily aggressive oppositional stance.
I think Kim is a victim of a tradition that traps both male and female rappers - a tradition that hip hop did not create. I believe she is acting on a number of damaging motives rooted in issues of race, gender and class. I think engaging in this as a spectator, and turning it into a form of titillating, ringside fun perpetuates a whole lotta nasty ish.

Pass the baton on ma. There is room for everyone. Unity is the one